Beyond Market Logics: Payments for Ecosystem Services as Alternative Development Practices in the Global South

Beyond Market Logics: Payments for Ecosystem Services as Alternative Development Practices in the Global South Elizabeth Shapiro-Garza , Pamela McElwee Gert Van Hecken and Esteve Corbera , ABSTRACT Payments for Ecosystem Services (PES) initiatives, which provide financial incentives for management practices thought to increase the production of environmental benefits, have expanded across the global South since the late 1990s. These initiatives have thus far been conceptualized rather narrowly; by their early proponents as a novel economic instrument for more ‘rational’, effective and efficient environmental policy or by their critics as an exogenously imposed conduit of hegemonic neoliberalism. This introductory article to the special issue that follows advocates for and demonstrates a more grounded and historically situated approach for understanding the conformation and outcomes of PES in actual practice. It proposes a framework for examining individual PES initiatives as shaped by dynamic interactions between imposed structure and the development pathways and situated agency of actors in the territories in which they are implemented. It finds that certain ubiquitous components of this approach — the valuation of nature, the creation of institutions and the negotiations that inevitably surround the distribution of benefits — provide potential openings for articulation and engagement that can allow these initiatives to be contested, adapted, hybridized or more fully co-opted and captured. This framework opens a pathway for more inclusive, nuanced and grounded research on PES and on market-based environment and development policies more broadly. INTRODUCTION Payments for Ecosystem or Environmental Services (PES) initiatives, which provide financial incentives for management practices thought to produce The authors acknowledge the very valuable support and feedback received from Vijay Kolinjivadi and the anonymous reviewers of earlier drafts of this Introduction. Corbera notes that this work is contributing to the research conducted by the ICTA-UAB ‘Unit of Excellence’ (MDM2015-0552). McElwee’s work on PES was enabled by grant 1061862 from the National Science Foundation’s Division for Geography and Regional Science. Shapiro-Garza’s research on this topic was supported by grant funding from the Tinker Foundation, the International Initiative for Impact Evaluation (OW2.031) and the National Science Foundation (1061867). Development and Change 0(0): 1–23. DOI: 10.1111/dech.12546  C 2019 International Institute of Social Studies. 2 E. Shapiro-Garza, P. McElwee, G. Van Hecken and E. Corbera environmental benefits to humans, have rapidly expanded across the globe since the late 1990s. Supported by the concurrent rise of neoliberalism as a global political project, PES approaches have been widely promoted and implemented. These initiatives vary widely in scope and focus, ranging from large-scale, state-run and -funded programmes in China, Mexico, Costa Rica, Ecuador and elsewhere, to a plethora of subnational and local initiatives for carbon sequestration, watershed protection and biodiversity conservation. The types of incentives provided in these PES initiatives and their sources, including governments, NGOs, private companies and public–private partnerships, also vary widely (Börner et al., 2017; Ezzine-de-Blas et al., 2016; Salzman et al., 2018). Two decades of experience with the PES approach has demonstrated that few, if any, initiatives conform to the assumptions that underlie the original, neoclassical economic model. These assumptions include the belief that the degradation of ecosystems can be counteracted with the provision of direct, financial incentives with prices set by a market; that voluntary participants will engage in conservation efforts if the incentives are sufficient to cover opportunity costs; that transaction costs will be low; and that the effectiveness of such efforts can be easily quantified and measured (Muradian et al., 2010; Vatn, 2010; Wunder, 2005). A growing body of research has begun to explore the dynamic processes through which ‘actually existing’ PES initiatives (Bakker, 2010) have defied the logic of this model as they are altered and adapted to conform to specific development pathways and local contexts, influenced and altered through the situated agency of the actors involved (Hendrickson and Corbera, 2015; McElwee et al., 2014; Milne and Adams, 2012; Osborne and Shapiro-Garza, 2018; Shapiro-Garza, 2013b; Van Hecken et al., 2015; vonHedemann and Osborne, 2016). Building on this emerging research focus and approach, this special issue examines why PES, constructed on market-based principles and promoted as part of the neoliberal political project, often does not look nearly as ‘marketlike’ or neoliberal on the ground. Through subtle, situated, empirically rich and theoretically informed analyses, the 10 articles that comprise this special issue analyse the variegated ways and degrees to which the original model of PES has been adopted, contested, adapted, hybridized and transformed to fit other ontologies and purposes. The articles are based on research conducted in a diversity of geographies and contexts, and a variety of types and scales of PES approaches. These range from NGO-initiated, smallscale carbon offsetting on the steppes of Mongolia (Upton, this issue) and watershed management projects in Colombia (Nelson et al., this issue) and Ecuador (Joslin, this issue), to regional projects for Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation (REDD+) in Indonesia (Setyowati, this issue) and Brazil (Greenleaf, this issue), to nationally scaled PES policies of the centralized states of Mexico (Corbera et al., this issue; ShapiroGarza, this issue), Guatemala (vonHedemann, this issue), China (He, this issue) and Vietnam (McElwee et al., this issue). Taking a political ecology PES as Alternative Development Practices in the Global South 3 approach, these authors frame their analyses of specific PES initiatives in the global South as an often-idiosyncratic form of development practice that is influenced by and mediates between global structural trajectories (e.g. capitalism, developmentalism or environmentalism) and the locally situated, historically defined and grounded practices of the actors involved (Cleaver, 2012; Peluso, 2012). In doing so, these articles redirect attention to how such interventions are hybridized or completely changed through the exercise of both visible and invisible power, and how adaptation occurs ‘in the interplay between deliberate design, everyday practices and relationships and societal processes’ (Cleaver, 2012: 171). In exploring these cases as a whole, it becomes clear that variances from the theoretical, economistic model of PES are not just outliers, but the norm. We also begin to see patterns emerge, making explicit the means and mechanisms through which PES concepts and practices are contested, hybridized and/or transformed: through discursive battles over the framing and mapping of these initiatives, including over alternative and non-economistic values for socio-natural systems; through existing yet ever-evolving institutions and emergent governance structures; and through contestations over equity and identity. In this sharpening of our understanding of what PES is in practice and what it can become, we begin to see that certain required components of the neoclassical economic model, promoted by the neoliberal political project — such as the need for valuation of nature, the creation of institutions, and the negotiations that inevitably surround the distribution of benefits — also afford and can allow for local interpretations and flexibility. We thus join a growing body of research into the ways and degrees to which subjects of neoliberal interventions are able to find ‘surfaces of engagement’ (Escobar, 1999: 13) through which they can, to a greater or lesser extent, alter, adapt and, in some cases, create spaces for wholesale transformations of exogenously imposed models in conformity to their own aims and goals (Bigger and Dempsey, 2018). The following section provides a brief summary of the history of PES theory and practice, and reviews related recent scholarship, particularly critiques aimed at improving PES outcomes and those that reject PES’s assumptions entirely. The subsequent section presents a theoretical framework for understanding the grounded practice of PES and similar environmental interventions as an interplay between structural interventions and the development pathways of the sites of implementation and the situated agency of the actor groups involved. We then examine three particular components of the PES approach where we see this interplay opening new spaces for engagement: in the valuation of nature, in the creation of rules and institutions, and around issues of benefits and equity. We conclude with an examination of the ethical and methodological implications of our framing of PES, how it is conceived, and what it can become. 4 E. Shapiro-Garza, P. McElwee, G. Van Hecken and E. Corbera PAYMENTS FOR ECOSYSTEM SERVICES: HISTORY, PRINCIPLES AND CRITIQUES The theoretical model of PES and other ‘market-based’ environmental approaches emerged in the 1980s, based on neoclassical economic theory on optimal ways to internalize the value of environmental externalities. Grounded in the approaches of both Pigou (1932) and Coase (1960), economists argued for assigning values to non-market goods as a means to increase the efficiency and effectiveness of environmental policy and conservation measures (Hahn and Stavins, 1992). The term ‘ecosystem services’ (ES) was coined as part of a concurrent movement by ecologists and conservation practitioners to make explicit the direct value of nature to human well-being (Costanza and Daly, 1992; Costanza et al., 1997). These two approaches were combined in the theoretical model of PES, as captured in the most often cited definition: as a market-like ‘voluntary transaction where a well-defined ES (or a land-use likely to secure that service) is “bought” by an ES buyer from an ES provider if and only if the ES provider secures ES provision’ (Wunder, 2005: 3). According to this model, market forces will be able to generate payments that ‘translate external, non-market values of the environment into real financial incentives for local actors to provide such services’ (Engel et al., 2008: 664; see also Gómez-Baggethun and Ruiz-Perez, 2011). The remarkable spread of PES throughout the last two decades is a product of a broader, concerted promotion of market-based approaches in environmental governance propelled by the concurrent rise of neoliberalism as a global political and economic project (Heynen et al., 2007; McAfee, 2012; McCarthy and Prudham, 2004). The fundamental assumptions of the original PES model both emerged from and coincided with those underlying neoliberalism, and of neoliberal environmental governance in particular. These assumptions include the belief that market-based approaches are inherently more efficient and cost-effective than regulatory command and control policies; that monetary pricing and market systems provide the most flexible and efficient means of valuation, particularly when associated with secure property rights; that market valuation can create new tradable and fungible (nature-based) commodities; and that decisions by individuals to conserve or degrade ecosystems and biodiversity are primarily based on economic rationales and, as such, can be changed by providing financial incentives (Gómez-Baggethun and Muradian, 2015; Gómez-Baggethun et al., 2010; Norgaard, 2010). Some of the other approaches to environmental governance that fall under the rubric of ‘market-based’ include pollution and emissions trading schemes, eco-certifications, ecotourism, conservation easements and bioprospecting (Woodward et al., 2014). PES programmes have now been implemented on most continents at national, subnational and local scales: recent accounting has documented over 500 existing programmes — of which some may embed dozens of PES as Alternative Development Practices in the Global South 5 local projects — with transactional annual economic transfers of US$ 30–50 billion (Salzman et al., 2018). Foundational initiatives in the global South include Costa Rica’s adoption of the first national PES policy in 1997 (Lansing, 2014) and regional projects, such as the Scolel Té carbon offsetting project in Chiapas, Mexico (Osborne, 2015) and Water Funds in Ecuador (Joslin, this issue) and Colombia (Nelson et al., this issue). These and other PES initiatives in the global South were specifically introduced, promoted and/or funded by disseminators of neoliberal ideology such as the World Bank, the German Corporation for International Cooperation, and the United States Agency for International Development, as well as others less associated with such neoliberal paradigms, including conservation organizations and anti-poverty NGOs (Gómez-Baggethun et al., 2010; McAfee, 1999). This broad adoption at such varied scales and circumstances suggests that the PES approach has found widespread resonance with environmental policy makers and practitioners, a phenomenon this special issue explores in more depth. Principles of the Payments for Ecosystem Services Model The original, economistic model of PES is built upon several core assumptions. The first is the concept of ecosystem services (ES), recognizing and accounting for the value of ‘nature’ in the benefits it provides to humans. The key argument for adopting this concept has been that conventional economic accounting only values ecosystems for the extracted products that enter the market, not for the externalized services they provide (Costanza et al., 1997; Gómez-Baggethun and Ruiz-Perez, 2011). By placing a monetary value on ES provisioning, economists argued that these ecosystem functions would become legible within the economy, and hence valued (Costanza et al. 2014; de Groot et al., 2002). Another basic premise of the economistic model of PES is that markets are generally more efficient and cost-effective than government-led mechanisms such as regulation, taxes, subsidies, public investments, etc., including in the provision of environmental goods and services (Gómez-Baggethun and Muradian, 2015). The original PES model envisioned direct monetary transactions between those who supplied ES and those who benefited from them, using negotiation and price setting within markets to subsequently ensure an efficient and effective provision of the targeted ecosystem services (Engel et al., 2008; Wunder, 2005). According to this model, the incentives paid to ES providers can take multiple forms, from actual cash payments to offers in kind. Based on these same premises, in order to achieve optimal cost-effectiveness, the amount should be just slightly more than the opportunity costs of conversion to other land uses, preferably set through mutual bargaining, or through ‘market-based’ mechanisms such as reverse auctions, analysis of ES producers’ ‘willingness to accept’ or opportunity 6 E. Shapiro-Garza, P. McElwee, G. Van Hecken and E. Corbera cost estimations (Engel et al., 2008). Based on basic economic principles, the formation of markets for ES required that information is widely shared, that transaction costs (i.e. negotiation of the contract, monitoring of the completion of the terms, etc.) are covered by the buyer(s) through inclusion in the price, and that property rights are secured as one way to make contracts and transactions enforceable (Lockie, 2013). Two further key concepts in this model of PES are that the ES conserved should be additional to what would have been produced in the absence of the payments (additionality) and that ES, or the management practices thought to produce them, are measured and payments are stopped or other sanctions are imposed if production is inadequate (conditionality) (Muradian et al., 2010). This original model of PES, focused on efficient delivery of ES, includes no consideration of whether outcomes will be socially equitable (Wunder, 2007). Many advocates of the PES model have argued that, while financial benefits may trickle down due to the frequent overlap between areas of high poverty and ‘high value’ ecosystems, targeting criteria must be determined by hard-nosed economic analysis or conservation science, remaining unsullied by social or political objectives (Martin et al., 2014a; Wunder, 2007; Wunder et al., 2018). They claim that targeting beneficiaries who are not the primary agents of environmental degradation or who cannot participate effectively in PES would compromise efficiency (Pagiola et al., 2005). Nonetheless, many pro-PES scholars and practitioners have since endorsed the idea that the inclusion of such ‘side’ objectives can sometimes be necessary in order to accommodate local political pressures and/or social norms (Wegner, 2016; Wunder et al., 2018). Critiques of Payments for Ecosystem Services Since the introduction and expansion of the concept and practice of PES over the last two decades, two broad strands of critique have emerged, which we label ‘pro-PES’ and ‘anti-PES’. The pro-PES strand has been generated primarily from within environmental economics and seeks to improve upon the outcomes of these programmes through refinement, or more faithful application, of the existing model. In observing the dynamics and outcomes of PES initiatives implemented at a myriad of scales and in a great variety of geographies, there has been a growing recognition amongst these critics that the original economistic model of PES has been unevenly applied and adopted (Vatn, 2015). They note that the majority of PES programmes do not use true markets, or even ‘market-based’ mechanisms, to value and price ecosystem services and have identified a number of barriers that call into question the hypothesized simplicity of Coasean transactions. These include contract disputes; lack of voluntary participation; persistent and confounding involvement by state actors; poor information exchange between participants; difficulties in measuring the production of ES; barriers to PES as Alternative Development Practices in the Global South 7 enforcing sanctions; and both costly and ecologically inadequate processes of ‘commodity’ establishment and exchange (Börner et al., 2017; Calvet-Mir et al., 2015; McElwee, 2017; Vatn, 2010, 2015; Wunder et al., 2018). ProPES scholars have ascribed deviations from the ideal-type model in the design of actual PES initiatives, and the fact that many have produced less than impressive environmental outcomes, to an unwillingness or inability of practitioners to follow advice from economists on institutional design (Ezzinede-Blas et al., 2016; Wunder et al., 2018) or to incorporate ‘scientifically’ derived understandings of ecosystem function and role (Naeem et al., 2015). Acknowledging that PES initiatives across the globe very rarely met all conditions of the original model, Wunder proposed a new, less rigid definition of PES, as ‘voluntary transactions, between service users and service providers that are conditional on agreed rules of natural resource management for generating offsite services’ (2015: 241). Others have moved further, attempting to capture the hybrid institutional nature of these initiatives and broaden the narrow focus on efficiency to encompass other criteria such as equity, justice and ecological sustainability (Farley and Costanza, 2010; Muradian et al., 2010). The ‘anti-PES’ strand of critique has emerged from critical geography, political ecology, ecological economics and other disciplines, and challenges the fundamental assumptions underlying the economistic model and the dynamics and outcomes of existing initiatives. Falling under the broader rubric of scholarship on ‘neoliberal natures’ (Heynen et al., 2007), this critique has focused on the structural trends, namely capitalism and neoliberalism, that have led to the dominance of market-based discourse and practice in environmental policy worldwide, of which PES is but one flavour. This literature is, broadly, grounded in concerns over the social and environmental repercussions of different modes of political and economic neoliberalism, resulting in processes of ‘accumulation by dispossession’ (Harvey, 2004) through the privatization of public goods, the financialization and marketization of everything, and a hollowing out or repurposing of state institutions (Arsel and Büscher, 2012; Büscher et al., 2012; McCarthy and Prudham, 2004; Sullivan, 2009). From this perspective, inserting capitalist, free-market ideology into environmental protection is equivalent to asking the cat to guard the canary (Büscher, 2012; Fletcher, 2012; McAfee, 2012; Sullivan, 2009). Much of the neoliberal natures literature on PES has highlighted the potential or observed impacts on access to natural resources, loss of tenure or other rights, and elite capture of benefits. Many of these authors reject PES as a ‘Trojan horse’ approach to conservation, concealing an agenda which embodies the many contradictions of capitalism: the desire for increased commodification and new markets behind attention to ecosystem services; and laying the blame for environmental degradation on the least privileged countries and people rather than on international capitalism itself (Büscher et al., 2012; McAfee, 2012; Sikor and Newell, 2014). 8 E. Shapiro-Garza, P. McElwee, G. Van Hecken and E. Corbera Kosoy and Corbera (2010), for example, refer to PES as a form of ‘commodity fetishism’, by which the creation of new commodities (the paid-for ecosystem services) actually hides the complex social values and relationships that go into human–nature relations in any given place (Van Hecken et al., 2015). According to this critique, the creation of these new commodities, which may circulate internationally and far from their places of origin, is a form of ‘value abstraction’ that facilitates capital accumulation (Fletcher and Büscher, 2017), thereby running the risk of reproducing existing inequalities in access to and use of natural resources, and even leading to dispossession through ‘green grabbing’ (Fairhead et al., 2012). Further, these scholars critique the use of incentives within PES, claiming that the assumption that all humans are ‘utility maximizers’ can have perverse outcomes, as they may introduce capitalist thinking into areas where alternative values have dominated (Büscher et al., 2012). What is made abundantly clear from this first body of scholarship is that PES initiatives vary considerably from the economistic ideal-type, and on multiple fronts. While the pro-PES camp attributes these deviances to an inability of practitioners to stay true to the model, the anti-PES scholarship has yet to explain these variances in a systematic way. This special issue seeks to rectify that oversight. ANALYTICAL FRAMEWORKS FOR UNDERSTANDING PES IN PRACTICE The analytical framework we propose below understands the diversity of observed outcomes in PES in practice as a direct result of the rich interplay of structure and agency. On the one hand, such an approach acknowledges the constraints of structural forces, such as neoliberalism, existing institutions or uneven power, on the grounded practice and ultimate outcomes of PES. At the same time, the multifaceted dynamics, design, outcomes and even underlying theorization of PES initiatives also require attention to the agency of the actors engaged. A small but growing body of critical scholarship, including now the studies discussed in this special issue, takes a political ecology approach in applying rich observations and data from the sites of PES implementation to examine this interplay of structure and agency as the driver of the variation in both the design, dynamics and outcomes (Kolinjivadi et al., 2017; Shapiro-Garza, 2013a; Van Hecken et al., 2015; Vatn, 2010). While this framework could be applied to analyse the context and dynamics of a wide variety of development interventions, it provides particular utility and insights into studies of PES. Because PES attempts to alter fundamental aspects of socio-natural systems (e.g. shift people’s value for ‘nature’, form entirely new markets and commodities, create new institutions to measure outcomes, manage incentives and impose conditionality, etc.), focusing on how initiatives play out on the ground PES as Alternative Development Practices in the Global South 9 offers us insight into how and why the theory and rationales underlying interventions shape, or fail to shape, actual dynamics, conformations and outcomes. On the one hand, structures such as development pathways, which include economic, environmental and political context as well as local institutional, social and cultural norms, clearly shape the specific ways in which PES theory will be adopted, adapted and applied in practice (Bétrisey et al., 2018; Osborne and Shapiro-Garza, 2018; Rodrı́guez-Robayo and Merino-Perez, 2017; vonHedemann and Osborne, 2016). At the same time, structure alone does not account for the many observed deviations from the economistic, neoliberal model of PES. Working within and influenced by structural constraints, local actors inevitably adapt PES to better ‘fit’ within their own epistemologies and practices of human–nature relationships, concepts of value and understanding of the root causes of and solutions for environmental degradation (Van Hecken et al., 2018). We therefore posit that the concepts of ‘development pathways’ and ‘situated agency’ provide a strong framework for describing, explaining and understanding the dynamics of epistemological contestations and the degree to which they are able to influence PES processes and outcomes. These frameworks help make sense of why PES looks the way it does on the ground; not as deviance from an idealized model, but as predictable outcomes of complex processes. Pre-existing institutions and conditions in the sites of implementation create challenges of institutional path-dependency that clearly impact the forms and types of PES interventions that are possible in particular contexts (Wegner, 2016). At the same time, dynamics of power at multiple scales mediate the ways in which agency can be expressed and enacted within PES (Berbés-Blázquez et al., 2016). In advancing this more nuanced, situated and ‘context contingent’ conceptualization of PES (Sparke, 2008), we also see merit in engaging with more inductive, ‘grounded’ approaches to theory building in order to understand the co-production of the plurality of PES praxis (Kolinjivadi et al., 2019; Van Hecken et al., 2018). Such an approach argues against both the adoption of overly essentialist theorizations and the a priori privileging of any one form of theory over another when attempting to explain observed outcomes (Burawoy, 2001; Gibson-Graham, 2008; Larner, 2003). Instead, it allows specific observations of grounded praxis and active dialogue with those involved to inform knowledge generation, in such a manner that ‘welcomes surprise, tolerates coexistence, and cares for the new, providing a welcoming environment for the objects of our thought’ (Gibson-Graham, 2008: 619). As the articles in this special issue demonstrate, this approach allows for the emergence of an entangled micro–macro analysis, simultaneously capable of exploring the experience of structural constellations (such as neoliberalism, or the state broadly understood) and the very production of these constellations (Burawoy, 2001: 150). 10 E. Shapiro-Garza, P. McElwee, G. Van Hecken and E. Corbera Development Pathways Building on the previous section’s discussion of the interaction of development pathways and situated agency and the importance of taking a grounded, inductive approach, we advocate for recognizing the territories in which PES are implemented as complex and dynamic systems, co-produced by the interaction of human activity and natural processes and inevitably influenced by historically built and evolving rules and norms, livelihood strategies, culture and worldviews, and underpinned by state policies, markets and changing environmental conditions (Bastiaensen et al., 2015; Berbés-Blázquez et al., 2016; Wegner, 2016). In particular, it is crucial to be aware of how current social–natural contexts and conditions reflect culturally and historically shaped practices about ‘the right way of doing things’ (Cleaver, 2012) which circulate within social networks and give rise to specific ‘rules’ leading to particular relational patterns (Van Hecken et al., 2019). This leads to an awareness that the present state of a given territory, locality or community depends on historical trajectories and on choices made at critical junctures in the past (Cleaver, 2012). In other words, social and economic interactions over time lead to the emergence of ‘development pathways’ that generate and condition the desirability and viability of specific policy interventions such as PES, as well as having an enormous influence on their outcomes (Bastiaensen et al., 2015). These might include very specific ways in which human–nature relations are framed and defined; on broader networks of power that determine what environments are more or less valuable than others; and particularly on the assumptions of how ecological outcomes can be delivered or achieved (Hausknost et al., 2017). In taking this approach to researching PES, it is key to understand these pathways as constantly evolving: actor groups continuously co-construct the human and natural territories they belong to and impact the processes that define development pathways by reproducing, reworking, contesting and renegotiating rules as well as maintaining or changing their social networks (Van Hecken et al., 2019). It is therefore vital to account for the ways in which PES practices shape and are shaped by these particular pathways, especially how these influence the ways in which different actors are able ‘to benefit from things’ (Ribot and Peluso, 2003: 153), inevitably involving winners and losers, depending on actors’ ability to sway others to their own views through the use of power, resources, knowledge and voice (Bastiaensen et al., 2015). Dependent on historical contingencies and divergent social relationships, PES policies can result in changes in cognitive perceptions and rationalities, and thus a different take on ‘environmentalism’ (Vatn and Vedeld, 2012), while for others PES might instead lead to the erosion of certain human–nature values (Rode et al., 2015). Such trajectories, while rarely linear or easily predicted, account for why PES can be adopted with only a few alterations from a neoliberal model in one place, while PES as Alternative Development Practices in the Global South 11 in another it may be transformed into something entirely unrecognizable as PES. Situated Agency Our framework for analysing the emergence of specific PES initiatives also recognizes the importance of the situated agency ‘of current actors and the influence of historically embedded structures, practices and legacies’ (Leach et al., 2010: 73). Seen through this lens, PES and other conservation and development interventions are in a continuous process of ‘becoming’, as the underlying arrangements and logics are (consciously or not) deconstructed and reassembled so as to cognitively and politically ‘fit’ with people’s worldviews and diverse objectives (Cleaver, 2012; Hart, 2006). Taking this approach requires empirical analysis of the ways in which local actors attempt to either adopt and adapt or directly contest an intervention’s intended principles and practices, in order to realign it with their social-ecological conditions and objectives (Katz, 2005). Emphasis on situated agency also requires critical analysis of how socially embedded inequities and power relations at multiple scales shape the outcomes of these institutional re-arrangements (Berbés-Blázquez et al., 2016; Van Hecken et al., 2015). For example, the ubiquitous power relations that lead to unequal access to and distribution of resources within communities can be exacerbated by PES interventions that do not account for these differences (Partzsch, 2017). Inserting PES into situations of tenure inequality, weak collective action or highly uneven power relations may make these conditions more severe (Corbera et al., this issue; Holmes and Cavanagh, 2016; Milne and Adams, 2012; Nelson et al., this issue; Osborne, 2015; Rodrı́guez de Francisco et al., 2013). On the other hand, where there are openings, PES can facilitate claims of recognition and legitimacy, strengthen community participation and social capital, or provide financial and political support for local rights (Bétrisey et al., 2018; Joslin and Jepson, 2018; McElwee et al., this issue; Osborne and Shapiro-Garza, 2018; Setyowati, this issue; Upton, this issue). In these latter cases, alterations from the original neoliberal model of PES can often be most extreme, to the point where ‘capture’ of the PES initiative for entirely different reasons and justifications can appear. Additionally, the process of selecting which ecosystem services to value, and their price, is historically shaped by power, with the potential to reflect other ‘principles and virtues’ that people both value and use to make sense of their interactions with or existence as part of ‘nature’, as we note below (Berbés-Blázquez et al., 2016). Mediated by relations of power and historical trajectories in the sites of implementation that determine their degree of agency, the constellation of actors involved can therefore, to a greater or lesser degree, co-produce and co-constitute the conceptualization and grounded conformation of PES initiatives. 12 E. Shapiro-Garza, P. McElwee, G. Van Hecken and E. Corbera OPENINGS FOR ARTICULATIONS AND ENGAGEMENT Applying the framework described above, we explore here the particular elements within the PES conceptual model and approach that seem to provide openings for articulation with the development pathways in the sites of implementation and engagement through the situated agency of the actors most involved. A review of the cases represented in the articles of this special issue and in the existing body of literature on the subject suggests that three of the instituted processes that are necessarily part of the formation of PES provide the greatest opportunities for articulation and engagement: the valuation of ecosystems and the creation of financial incentives; the formation of institutions and rules; and the consideration of issues of equity and benefit sharing in the distribution of incentives. Examining these specific sites of engagement within specific PES initiatives provides insights into how ‘cracks’ in PES’s neoliberal facade appear and can be used to open new pathways and alternatives. Values and Markets for Ecosystem Services One of the defining features of the PES approach is that it requires negotiation of how to place new, direct (often financial) values on socio-natures and to translate that valuation into the design of incentive schemes (Bigger and Robertson, 2017). As such, this approach necessarily intersects and can be in contradiction with other values for social-natural systems held by actors involved in implementation. Yet rather than necessarily being ‘antidemocratic’ or being driven by cold-headed economic logic, as some have suggested (Matulis, 2014), grounded studies of PES, including those in this special issue, suggest that this process of opening discussions regarding valuation have the potential to create spaces for engagement and negotiation, as well as to lead to conflicts and debates over how it should be performed, if at all (Corbera, 2015; Sikor and Newell, 2014). The question of valuation is approached from varying perspectives in PES scholarship. The pro-PES literature has prioritized the need to identify and value ES through direct negotiations between market actors, or, if that is not possible, then through standardized methodologies (Costanza and Daly, 1992). The anti-PES literature by contrast warns that ES valuation is often driven by outsiders and ‘experts’ imposing economistic metrics, leading to ‘nonhuman natures [that] tend to become flattened and deadened into abstract and conveniently uncommunicative and inanimate objects, primed for commodity capture in service to the creation of capitalist value’ (Büscher et al., 2012: 23). One thing that the grounded examinations of PES in practice makes clear is that the technocratic conceptualization of generic ecosystem services and abstract valuation represented in the original, economistic model of PES is a PES as Alternative Development Practices in the Global South 13 vast oversimplification of the complexity of human values and relationships within social-ecological systems (Kolinjivadi et al., 2017; Singh, 2015; Van Hecken et al., 2018). Although these ontological contestations are fraught with power-laden complications involving who can be a subject of or a producer of value (Gudynas, 2019), critical scholars have explored the ways in which the values held for the social-natural systems in the sites of implementation, and the labour and social relations that produce or constitute them, can intersect with and alter both the meaning and means of PES, as well as the barriers to doing so (Arias-Arévalo et al., 2018; Bétrisey et al., 2018; Ishihara et al., 2017; Jackson and Palmer, 2014; Masood, 2018; Osborne and Shapiro-Garza, 2018; Singh, 2015; Van Hecken et al., 2018). In fact, despite the understandable concerns that the use of ES concepts would lead inevitably to commodification and financialization (Sullivan, 2009), the lack of development of true markets, or even market-like policy mechanisms in PES, gives an indication of the obstacles to abstracting and capturing the value of ecosystem services, including their messy materiality and inextricable embeddedness with the producers and sites of production, which in turn serve as potential leverage points for adaptation and hybridization (Dempsey and Robertson, 2012; McElwee, 2017; Osborne and Shapiro-Garza, 2018; Van Hecken et al., 2018). The articles of this special issue demonstrate how assessment and valuation of nature happen in diverse ways, and how values relating to socioecological relationships are often extremely context-dependent, stymieing attempts to impose cookie-cutter templates for monetization and commodification. For instance, Upton (this issue) provides a nuanced, ethnographic account of a carbon offsetting programme in Mongolia illustrating the diverse ontologies, practices and relations of care, and the ways in which they may be valorised, empowered, transformed or undermined through PES. Greenleaf (this issue) similarly addresses the valuation of socio-environmental relationships in her analysis of the rejection of the concept of ‘opportunity costs’ in favour of localized ‘incentives’ in the case of a REDD+ forest-based carbon offsetting programme in Acre, Brazil. In Mexico, Shapiro-Garza (this issue) examines the production and influence of an alternative theorization of PES, one that engages with the notion that ecosystem services have value, but proposes that their value should be calculated by the labour and stewardship of campesinos (peasants) who produce them and that the state has a necessary role in their regulation and in ensuring their equitable distribution. In another example, Nelson et al. (this issue) trace the origins of the Water Fund for Life and Sustainability (FAVS) initiative in Colombia back to its initiation in 1989 by a politically and economically powerful sugarcane cultivators’ association as a means to secure water for irrigation, examining the ways in which this initiative has continued to be shaped and driven by the values and priorities of that group, often to the detriment of other actors involved. 14 E. Shapiro-Garza, P. McElwee, G. Van Hecken and E. Corbera Hybrid Institutional Formations In order to work in practice, PES requires the formation of new institutional arrangements and engagements, the ‘rules of the game’ that involve both customary practices and the myriad of organizations operating at multiple scales (Ostrom, 2005; Vatn, 2010). In contrast to neoliberal notions of PES controlled only by ‘the invisible hands of markets’, nearly all grounded cases of PES have required the expansion or creation of wholly new formal (i.e. states, NGOs and local-level governance entities) and informal (i.e. informal rules, norms and sanctions) institutions (Vatn, 2010). Mounting numbers of PES case studies indicate a necessary reliance on pre-existing institutions as well as the creation of these new, non-market institutions in order to manage the complexity of valuation, negotiation, transactions, monitoring and imposition of conditionality that PES requires (e.g. Barton et al., 2017). This dynamic provides openings for grounded actors to be able to shape the contours of PES, either through existing institutional channels or through negotiation in the process of formation of new institutions, in ways that other traditional environmental policy approaches foreclose (Merlet et al., 2018). Existing scholarship notes that the complex processes through which institutional bricolage (Cleaver, 2012) is enacted, the embedding of these primarily economic transactions in the historically determined and politically influenced institutions in the site of implementation (Polanyi, 1944), offers opportunities for the original model of PES to be adapted, hybridized or transformed (Ishihara et al., 2017; McElwee, 2012; McElwee et al., 2014; Shapiro-Garza, 2013a; Van Hecken et al., 2015; vonHedemann and Osborne, 2016). In turn, these embedded, but constantly evolving, institutions influence the ability of PES to alter local practices and of engaged actors to adopt, contest or adapt initiatives to meet their own priorities. A number of studies have examined the configurations of institutions and governance (e.g. histories of repressive versus empowering channels of political engagement; strength and equity of local institutions; dispersion of decision-making power to local levels, etc.) most likely to allow for these actors to exert their agency, embedding local values and social-ecological relationships with PES (Jackson and Palmer, 2014; Milne and Adams, 2012; Muradian and Rival, 2012; Osborne and Shapiro-Garza, 2018; Vatn, 2010). Numerous studies have also shed light on how local actor groups access new institutional and economic arrangements brought about by PES, including new spaces for participation and negotiation over rights (Martin et al., 2014b; Shapiro-Garza, 2013b) or new funding to invest in individual and collective development (Loft et al., 2017; Murtinho and Hayes, 2017). Many of the articles in this special issue explore the ways in which (existing, new or reshaped) institutions influence the structure and meaning of PES initiatives. In many of the cases, existing institutions act as both sites of engagement and the structures through which the PES model is adapted and hybridized. In the cases of China’s Sloping Lands Programme (He, PES as Alternative Development Practices in the Global South 15 this issue), Guatemala’s PINPEP programme (vonHedemann, this issue), Mexico’s National PES programmes (Shapiro-Garza, this issue), and Vietnam’s Payment for Forest Environmental Services programme (McElwee et al., this issue), the fact that they are government led allowed for ways and types of engagement — direct contestation through street protests, exertion of political pressure, covert influence exerted with and through local-level agencies — that would not be possible with truly market-led PES. The cases of both the FONAG Water Fund in Ecuador (Joslin, this issue) and the national Sloping Lands Programme of China (He, this issue), highlight the role that intermediary and local actors and institutions play in ‘translating’ the economistic, neoliberal model of PES to better fit the values, practices and institutional norms of specific sites of implementation. Additionally, both Upton (this issue) in Mongolia and Setyowati (this issue) in Indonesia examine the processes through which PES enabled participants to revitalize pre-existing socially embedded institutions, which in turn allowed them to make claims related to the ecosystems they manage. On the other hand, Corbera et al. (this issue) provide a nuanced analysis of the ways in which, because Mexico’s national PES programmes are enacted through existing local institutional structures, participation intensified existing conflicts over forest lands in one community, exacerbating political and social inequities and further disempowering the landless. Benefit Sharing and Equity Because PES provides direct, most often financial, incentives, questions of who benefits and who does not become both clear and direct — thus foregrounding issues of distributive equity (Mahanty et al., 2013). Benefit sharing and equity have certainly been the topic of heated discussion in PES practice and scholarship (Corbera et al., 2007; Mahanty et al., 2013; Milder et al., 2010; Pascual et al., 2014). For example, critics of PES have pointed out the uneven processes of subjectification that incentives produce (Holmes and Cavanagh, 2016), particularly through the economistic model of PES that demands a focus on efficiency and cost-effectiveness, while others have argued that a focus on fairness and procedural legitimacy can render PES more effective (Muradian et al., 2010; Pascual et al., 2014). The majority of PES initiatives have largely defied the economistic model, including legitimacy and social justice criteria in their design in an attempt to maximize both environmental and social outcomes (Kariuki et al., 2018; Leimona et al., 2015). Consideration of distributive equity in programme design is often informed by pre-existing development priorities and norms, particularly when being designed and managed by states, while in other cases concerns emerge and are enacted from the bottom-up actions of specific stakeholders (Asiyanbi et al., 2019; Corbera, 2015; He and Sikor, 2015). Procedural equity has been less of a focus: many PES initiatives largely or 16 E. Shapiro-Garza, P. McElwee, G. Van Hecken and E. Corbera entirely ignore the experience of women (Larson et al., 2018), the crucial role of attention to indigenous sovereignty and self-determination in PES schemes (Denham, 2017), or the difficulties of marginalized and poorer individuals in accessing PES (Bétrisey et al., 2018; Lansing, 2014). Even where targeting and other criteria have been designed to balance across environmental and social objectives, the distribution of costs and benefits across PES initiatives can be uneven and detrimental for disenfranchised actors (Calvet-Mir et al., 2015; Leimona et al., 2015; Loft et al., 2017). The PES case studies in this special issue provide examples of how both programme design issues and bottom-up agency have allowed for consideration of equity in PES, and the challenges stakeholders face in doing so. For example, Setyowati (this issue) describes the way in which a REDD+ programme allowed local communities in Aceh, Indonesia to frame recognition of their rights to their community forest as a way to access procedural justice and recognition through territorial citizenship. A number of the articles also examine the ways in which perceived inequitable distribution of costs and benefits have motivated local actors to contest and ultimately change the design and mode of implementation of national-level PES programmes in Mexico (Shapiro-Garza, this issue), Guatemala (vonHedemann, this issue) and particularly in Vietnam, where protests from payment recipients who felt that national conditionality impositions were inequitable instead successfully developed more locally agreed-upon benefit-sharing arrangements (McElwee et al., this issue). In yet other cases, we see how pre-existing, structural inequities in community-based institutions can jeopardize the potential of PES to change decision-making and representation practices, as in Chiapas, Mexico (Corbera et al., this issue) or exacerbate pre-existing power imbalances, as in Guatemala (vonHedemann, this issue) and Colombia (Nelson, this issue). CONCLUSIONS After over 20 years of promotion and development, PES and other marketbased instruments have become a mainstream approach to environmental conservation and management throughout the global South. Previous critiques of PES have either focused on analysing how they stray from the original, economistic model or have positioned this approach as inexorably enacting the hegemonic political and economic project of neoliberalism. Our argument is that one cannot study the ‘PES project’ by simply looking at PES prima facie, either by considering only consistency with theoretical design principles (Wunder et al., 2018), or by framing it as a neatly conceived and packaged concept that always conforms to the theorizations and practices of neoliberalism (Fletcher and Büscher, 2017). In contrast, we advocate for a grounded approach in PES research, one which, following in the tradition of political ecology, understands the dynamics and outcomes of any PES as Alternative Development Practices in the Global South 17 intervention as dictated by the interaction of structure and the development pathways and situated agency of relevant actors in the sites of implementation. The articles in this special issue offer a rich examination of the processes and dynamics of these interactions, through which PES initiatives are transformed, hybridized or otherwise stray from the theoretical model. In doing so, this scholarship attends to what Karl Polanyi called the ‘instituted processes’ through which markets and economic transactions are made and the degree to which their structure and terms can be ‘embedded’ in the institutions and social and cultural values of the sites of enactment (Polanyi, 1944). What we observe, and each of the cases illustrate, is that in the actual implementation of PES, deviation from a standard model is not only likely, but inevitable. As we have discussed, what these detailed dissections of PES in practice reveal is that the very processes necessitated by this approach — the valuation of nature, the creation of institutions and the negotiations that inevitably surround the distribution of benefits — can present openings to adapt these initiatives to local development pathways and needs. These findings are also valuable and relevant in a pragmatic and broader sense as they expose some of the cracks in the neoliberal project, elucidating possible channels and actions through which contestation can be successfully enacted. This bottom-up understanding of PES therefore helps us to see the alternative imaginaries that participants give to their involvement, and the ways in which these interactions present challenges to both the original model and the neoliberal milieu from which it evolved and was promoted. Applying our suggested framework does require a commitment to data gathering across time and geographic scales, and across a diversity of social actors (Asiyanbi, 2018). This approach requires critical ethnography ‘from within’, or what Hart calls ‘glocalized’ ethnography, in order to generate ‘new understandings by illuminating power-laden processes of constitution, connection, and disconnection, along with slippages, openings, and contradictions, and possibilities for alliance within and across different spatial scales’ (2006: 981–82). In different ways, at different levels and in a wide variety of geographies and contexts, all of the articles in this special issue have enacted this frame, employing rich, empirically grounded and theoretically informed means of gathering and analysing data. As such, this special issue provides useful and unique insights, beyond even the confines of PES, into the age-old debate on the relative importance of (institutional and power) structures and (locally grounded, value-informed) agency in the shaping of environment and development practice. As PES and other so-called market-based approaches to environmental protection expand and continue to become further embedded in the global South, it is essential that we as researchers and critical scholars are able to observe and report on the ways in which grounded initiatives interact with and act upon local social-ecological systems. Our intention is that the framework we have defined here, and applied in the articles in this special 18 E. Shapiro-Garza, P. McElwee, G. Van Hecken and E. Corbera issue, provides an approach that can be used to inform both the theory and grounded practice of PES. REFERENCES Arias-Arévalo, P., E. Gómez-Baggethun, B. Martı́n-López and M. Pérez-Rincón (2018) ‘Widening the Evaluative Space for Ecosystem Services: A Taxonomy of Plural Values and Valuation Methods’, Environmental Values 27(1): 29–53. Arsel, M. and B. 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(2007) ‘The Efficiency of Payments for Environmental Services in Tropical Conservation’, Conservation Biology 21(1): 48–58. PES as Alternative Development Practices in the Global South 23 Wunder, S. (2015) ‘Revisiting the Concept of Payment for Environmental Services’, Ecological Economics 117: 234–43. Wunder, S. et al. (2018) ‘From Principles to Practice in Paying for Nature’s Services’, Nature Sustainability 1(3): 1–6. Elizabeth Shapiro-Garza (corresponding author: elizabeth.shapiro@ duke.edu) is an Associate Professor of the Practice of Environmental Policy and Management at the Nicholas School of the Environment, Duke University, Durham, NC, USA. She is a human geographer whose research focuses on market-based environmental initiatives throughout Latin America. Pamela McElwee (pamela.mcelwee@rutgers.edu) is an Associate Professor of Human Ecology at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, New Jersey, USA. She has worked on forest and conservation issues in Vietnam since 1996, and is the author of Forests Are Gold: Trees, People and Environmental Rule in Vietnam (University of Washington Press, 2016). Gert Van Hecken (gert.vanhecken@unantwerpen.be) is an Assistant Professor at the Institute of Development Policy, University of Antwerp, Belgium. His research interests lie in the area of global and local environmental governance and social change, and particularly the socio-political dynamics triggered by Payments for Ecosystem Services. Esteve Corbera (esteve.corbera@uab.cat) is a Research Professor at the Institute of Environmental Science and Technology, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Spain. His research focuses on understanding the impacts of conservation and climate change policies on people’s well-being.